What Became of the Last Mustard Gas Delivered to the RAF
In 1955 Major Ian Toler, a WWII glider pilot, was appointed Resident Section Manager at I.C.I Randle Works in Runcorn and tasked with destroying 6,000 tons of bulk poison gas, mainly mustard gas from the tunnels at Rhydymwyn. The apparatus to achieve this was designed and tested by Porton Down. It was called the Apparatus Oil Smoke (AOS).
Major Toler was delayed in starting his destruction by the need for Randle to fulfil an order for 10,000 one thousand pound mustard gas bombs and additional 2,000 inert bombs filled with Calcium Chloride.
4,500 tons of grade I bulk mustard gas was shipped by rail from the five Forward Filling Depots (FFD)s at Barnham, Lord’s Bridge, Escrick, Melchbourne and Norton Disney by rail to Randle. This was described as Operations Spring Onion and Pepperpot and emptied the tanks in the FFDs.
Two thousand of the mustard gas bombs were shipped to RAF Norton Disney and the remaining eight thousand bombs and the two thousand inert bombs were stacked in a building at Randle. All of these bombs which measured 65 inches long by 16½ inches diameter were packaged in individual cases.
It appears that of an initial order for 176 inert bombs 76 were shipped to West Freugh in April 1953 and in March 1955 100 were shipped to RAF Boscombe Down, presumably to air test the bombs which were of a new design and were designated Type E2.
Except for one shipment of 70 inert bombs to RAE Fareham in November 1955 there were no further reports of their use,
Does anyone have any further knowledge on this topic?
Did you work on them, ship them, store them or even drop them (the inert ones of course)?
It is difficult to comprehend why we built these bombs from WWII mustard gas at a factory which had not assembled any in the last ten years and at a time when we were destroying all of our Chemical Weapons.